It’s been about six weeks since v1.2.0 and the Jekyll team is happy to announce the arrival of v1.3.0. This is a huge release full of all sorts of new features, bug fixes, and other things that you’re sure to love.

Here are a few things we think you’ll want to know about this release:

You can add arbitrary data to the site by adding YAML files under a site’s _data directory. This will allow you to avoid repetition in your templates and to set site specific options without changing _config.yml.

You can now run jekyll serve --detach to boot up a WEBrick server in the background. Note: you’ll need to run kill [server_pid] to shut the server down. When ran, you’ll get a process id that you can use in place of [server_pid]

You can now disable automatically-generated excerpts if you set excerpt_separator to "".

If you’re moving pages and posts, you can now check for URL conflicts by running jekyll doctor.

If you’re a fan of the drafts feature, you’ll be happy to know we’ve added -D, a shortened version of --drafts.

Permalinks with special characters should now generate without errors.

Expose the current Jekyll version as the jekyll.version Liquid variable.